Explaining geopolitical inventiveness: Late colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War (1945–1970)

Abstract This article tries to explain the flourishing of geopolitical alternatives to the nation-state form and foreign policies organized around giant militarized power blocs during the two decades after World War II. The first section presents these new approaches to organizing the world. The first set of alternatives consisted of ideas and practices of the federation and the amalgamation of states into larger political units. These included Senghor’s vision of a postcolonial federation in which France and its former colonies would be equals; Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa; and various short-lived amalgamations of states, including the Mali Federation and the United Arab Republic. These new geopolitical alternatives also included nonalignment, which originated with Jawaharlal Nehru of India and culminated with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia but also encompassed Ireland between 1957 and 1961 and France in the early Fifth Republic. One of the distinctive features of this conjuncture is that these experiments were not limited to the global peripheries, colonies, and recently decolonized states, but also characterized certain nonhegemonic European core countries. The second section examines a set of four factors in this period that created an opportunity structure or space of possibilities for geopolitical experimentation: (1) late colonialism; (2) the Cold War; (3) the character of decolonization; and (4) the United Nations. The coexistence of these factors opened spaces of maneuver and autonomy for a flourishing of geopolitical imaginaries. The final section discusses possible reasons for the end of this period of experimentation.